The present invention relates to a method for creating a hand-crafted or distressed appearance on items of furniture. More particularly, the invention relates to a method for creating distressed surfaces and edges for incorporation into items of furniture.
For centuries, wood has been the recognized and sought after material of choice for the construction of furniture. Although wood was an inexpensive material of construction for many years, the scarcity of most hardwoods has now made wooden furniture more expensive, particularly for selected hardwoods.
Over the years, furniture manufacturers have endeavored to create unique, rich-looking furniture collections that are appealing to a large number of buyers. Manufacturers have created price and quality ranges for home furnishings for nearly every price point in the market. Of particular interest and demand is furniture having a hand-crafted and hand-worn appearance. Antique furniture, for example, often contains the fingerprint of the furniture craftsman. Unique and random irregularities in the surface or the edges help make each piece special and valuable to the owner. Unfortunately, genuine antiques are limited in supply, and thus prohibitively expensive to most purchasers. Modem furniture techniques and materials can lead to the creation of furniture as good as, if not better than, that created by traditional hand methods. Nevertheless, customers desire the look of hand-crafted, combined with the better price that modern manufacturing techniques can yield.
Present-day manufacturers recognize the demand for antique furnishings and have sought to develop methods for creating new furniture that nonetheless has antique and handmade appearances. To do so, however, has been considerably challenging, involving a variety of labor intensive and costly techniques. For example, some manufacturers have chosen to purchase aged materials to form their furniture. Others have taken new materials and attempted to create distressed appearances thereon by manual means such as using rasps, files, chains, or other hand tools. One such approach induces unevenness or wear along the joints of adjoining veneer sheets. While wear would normally result from use over an extended period, unevenness in early handmade furniture often resulted from imprecision in assembly or unevenness in the cutting of materials by hand. An approach to simulate this unevenness and simulated wear along the joints of adjoining sheets is to chisel or gouge by hand the joint on assembled furniture faces. These labor-intensive processes, however, add significant costs to each item of furniture.
Thus, there remains a need for furniture having distressed appearances that are affordable to a larger segment of the market.
The present invention relates, in part, to a process for creating, in an economical fashion, surface members for articles of furniture, and the resulting furniture. The process begins with the selection of at least one piece of veneer, the piece having at least one planar surface and at least one edge. Grooves are then formed along the edge of the planar surface. Once the forming process is complete, the veneer with grooves is suitable for assembling into an article of furniture to achieve a distressed appearance.
This and other aspects of the present invention will become apparent to those skilled in the art after a reading of the following description of the preferred embodiments when considered in conjunction with the drawings. It should be understood that both the foregoing general description and the following detailed description are exemplary and explanatory only and are not restrictive of the invention as claimed.